Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XXXVI. Foucault - part 16
From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 4 - The Castle of Murders cont...
...In traditional accounts, Tuke [William (1732-1822)] and Pinel [Philippe (1746-1826)] are portrayed as pioneers in the humane and enlightened treatment of the mentally ill. Tuke established an asylum in York, England, that was renowned for its bucolic setting and lack of physical restraints; Pinel at the height of the French Revolution liberated the inmates at Bicêtre, declaring, according to legend, that “these madmen are so intractable only because they have been deprived of air and freedom.”
In a radical reevaluation that would become characteristic of his work, Foucault cast a jaundiced eye on the reforms of both Tuke and Pinel, charging that what looks like progress is really an insidious new form of social control: thanks to their innovations, madness was “imprisoned in a moral world,” up to “our own day at least.”
Stressing Tuke’s Quaker background, Foucault documents his efforts to effect a moral reformation among his patients, in part by trying to teach religious principles, in part by placing the inmates under perpetual surveillance: “For the free terror of madness,” he charges, Tuke substituted “the enclosed anguish of responsibility.”
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Pinel, he contends, achieved a similar end with different means. In Pinel’s asylum, too, the absence of visible constraints signifies “not unreason liberated, but madness long since mastered,” through a disciplined regimen designed to inculcate a sense of repentance and remorse.
The result, charges Foucault, was all the more devastating for being largely invisible and unobtrusive: stripped of the aura of supernatural mystery, “the madman found himself purified of his animality, or at least that part of his animality that was violence, predation, rage, savagery.” Trying to make coercion and physical constraints needless, Tuke and Pinel aimed to produce “a docile animality.” The patients in Pinel’s asylum were ushered into “the calm world of the traditional virtues.” What under the ancien regime had been “a visible fortress of order” with tangible chains and spectacular punishments was turned into “the castle of our conscience...”
I can’t help, at this point, imagining a meeting of activists around the topic of asylum reform -- the kind of event that lead to the adoption of Care in the Community in so many places -- when the idealistic young reformers suddenly realize that Foucault, while opposing the status-quo, would be happy with a return to dungeons and outright torture. Perhaps this scene could be played to the Monty Python tune (but with new lyrics) of “I’m a Lumberjack.”
From this perspective, Pinel’s “liberation” has, as Foucault stresses in a passage of the most profound personal resonance, “a paradoxical meaning. The dungeon, the chains, the continual spectacle, the sarcasms were, to the sufferer in his delirium, the very element of his freedom.” In chains, the madman “could not be dislodged from his immediate truth.” But once the chains were taken away, and the madman inserted into a system of virtue, internalized in his conscience, he found himself confined anew, “in the limited use of an empty freedom.... Henceforth more genuinely confined than he could have been in a dungeon and chains, a prisoner of nothing but himself, the sufferer was caught in a relation to himself that was of the order of transgression, and in a nonrelation to others that was of the order of shame.” Society in this way is made to seem innocent: “The guilt is shifted inside.”
Unless the man called “mad” could somehow shift back the burden of guilt, there was no escape from this joyless, eternally repeated cycle of transgression and shame: “He feels himself punished, and he sees the sign of his innocence in that fact; free from all physical punishment, he must prove himself guilty.” Caught in just this cycle of transgression, Pinel’s symbolic “other,” Sade, also cannot escape: the Castle of Murders, like the Castle of Conscience, is a figure of confinement. The violence of Sade’s transgression promises pain as much as pleasure: resurrecting the “glory” of torture and physical punishment in a mad effort to recover the innocent freedom of Nature, the libertine is caught in “the endlessly repeated nonexistence of gratification.”
I have to point out here that A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess was published the year after Madness and Civilization. One could certainly see the character Alex as a Foucaultean hero.
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The theoretical assumptions behind this account, which yokes together morality and cruel impulses, guilt and a murderous kind of transgression, Foucault most clearly elaborated in an essay published in 1962. “In every culture there exists a coherent series of gestures of division,” Foucault writes, reiterating a central theme of Madness and Civilization. But “gestures of division” like “the delimitation of madness” and “the prohibition of incest” are inherently ambiguous: “the moment they mark a limit, they create the space of a possible transgression.” This is a timeless possibility: there is no limit that cannot be breached, no law that cannot be broken. Yet the field of possible transgression is always historically specific: every epoch “forms what one can call a ‘system of the transgressive.’ Properly speaking, this space coincides neither with the illegal nor the criminal, neither with the revolutionary, the monstrous nor the abnormal, not even with the sum total of all these deviant forms; but each of these terms designates at least an angle.”
This reminds me of Bataille’s human sacrifice club and that story (which is not in Chrome Yellow) where a character attempts to do something so vile it will summon Satan and thus prove the existence of God.
Acts of “transgression” may put a human being in touch with the chaotic power that Nietzsche called Dionysian; but no act of transgression can escape its origins in a historical field that, in crucial part, motivates, defines -- and insofar as the object of transgression is to tap the untamed energy of transcendence -- (de)forms it. “Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black and white, the prohibition to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust.”
The individual with mad impulses will thus discover that his or her struggle to express the self disclosed in the unreason of dreams and delirium is implicated, like it or not, in a specific, typically modern “system of the transgressive,” a kind of negative mirror image of the positive system of humanist virtue introduced by social reformers like Pinel.
To become what one is now requires, in Foucault’s view, casting one’s fate with those tragic figures, from Sade to Nietzsche and Artaud, who have resisted the “gigantic moral imprisonment” symbolized, in Madness and Civilization, by Tuke and Pinel. To escape from the Castle of Conscience, we must first enter into a Castle of Murders: against the alleged virtues inculcated by the psychiatrists, transgression will unleash vice; against philanthropic kindness, vengeful cruelty; against a docile animality, a seething lust for corporeal sensation, no matter how painful or self-destructive.
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This descent into the Inferno is obviously no upbeat “liberation.” Entering Sade’s dungeon of dreams, the human being becomes, both figuratively and literally, a “prisoner of the passage,” “a slave of desires and the servant of the heart.” For the madman, whether confined in a castle or free to set sail, is “bound fast at the infinite crossroads” -- specifically, the “infinite crossroads” of history.
“Captive in the human heart, hammered into it, madness can formulate that which was at the outset true of man,” but it can never return “to the native land,” it cannot recapture the liberty of an untrammeled transcendence, the ding-an-sich of Kant’s pure freedom. Indeed, the experience of madness, like that of dreams, reveals “the knot that ties freedom to the necessity of the world.”
But there is more. By exhaustively documenting how the posers of transcendence called mad are tethered by cultural forms beyond the human being’s control, Foucault’s account suggests that the notions of guilt and responsibility formulated by modern philosophers from Kant to Sartre are radically mistaken: “Everything that has been formulated as the truth of man passes over to the side of irresponsibility.” The kind of “experience’ explored by Bataille and Blanchot, Foucault will later assert in The order of Things, discloses through “repetition” an “original innocence” -- a mark of the human being’s “finitude (trapped in the opening and bondage of that finitude).”
Nietzsche, too, in Human, All Too Human (first published in 1878), had hypothesized that every human being was a “necessary consequence” of an almost unintelligibly complex web of factors “assembled from the elements and influence of things past and present.” A human being’s character was not unalterable, according to Nietzsche: the capacity of transcendence he called “will to power” meant that a person could always, to some extent, start anew. Still, “during the brief lifetime of a man” Nietzsche supposed that “the effective motives are unable to scratch deeply enough to erase the imprinted script of many millennia.” Much about, “what one was” could simply not be changed, try as one might. “Trapped in the opening and bondage” of a history, the will was never entirely free. Viewed without the blinkers of traditional moral philosophy, the individual, Nietzsche thought, could therefore “be made accountable for nothing, not for his nature, not for his motives, nor for his actions, nor for the effects he produces.” The man who deviated from the norm, Nietzsche stressed, was particularly blameless: for in such cases, “our tame, mediocre, emasculated society” often took “the strong human being and made him sick.” Feelings of shame were unwarranted, Guilt was a figment of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a crippling fiction, buried deep in the body, coded in “the imprinted script of many millenia.”
Compare that idea with this interesting passage, one of Paloma’s “Profound Thoughts,” from The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery:
...humans live in a world where it’s words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who’ve been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.
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The “ethical point of view” expressed in Madness and Civilization may now be summarized briefly:
-- It is not immoral to be convulsed by singular fantasies and wild impulses; such limit-experiences are to be valued as a way of winning back access to the occluded, Dionysian dimension of being human.
--It is not a human being’s fault if these impulses, confined and regimented, have been driven inward and transmogrified, creating potentially murderous new impulses. The insane and volatile configuration of these impulses today is a legacy of the history of confinement and moral reproach recounted in the pages of Madness and Civilization.
The man called “mad” is innocent.
It is society that is guilty.
From the West Side Story song “Officer Krupke” (1957):
JETS
We're disturbed, we're disturbed,
We're the most disturbed,
Like we're psychologic'ly disturbed.
DIESEL: (Spoken, as Judge) In the opinion of this court, this child is depraved on account he ain't had a normal home.
ACTION: (Spoken) Hey, I'm depraved on account I'm deprived.
DIESEL: So take him to a headshrinker.
And, Foucault adds, it is the peculiar burden of every modern “work” forged from an engagement with the daimonic and delirious to hold society accountable for its crimes.
Lonely, strange, and alien, desperately trying to rescue from oblivion the animal energies of being human, the works of Sade, Holderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Roussel, and Artaud of necessity issue in a frenzy of cruel and morbid fantasies, before lapsing into the silence of madness -- or the suicidal embrace of death. That is the tragedy of these works, but also their harrowing power: “by the madness which interrupts it,” such liminal works keep alive the possibility, for all those who come thoughtfully into contact with them, of a liminal experience, laying open for shared inspection, Foucault asserts, “a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer,... a breach without reconciliation,” where “the world is made aware of its guilt.”
Now I'm hearing the strains of Beethoven's “Ode to Joy” from A Clockwork Orange.
“Ruse and new triumph of madness,” Foucault concludes with a flourish: for “the world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychiatry must {now} justify itself before madness.” And “nothing” in our own placidly civilized world of humane virtues -- especially “not what it can know of madness” through the lives and works of its tortured votaries -- “assures the world that it is justified by such works of madness.”
I’m at a disadvantage here as I’m limited, for the most part, to the information Miller chooses to give me, and Miller is telling a particular story -- one that I’m enjoying, so far. But I’m surprised there hasn’t been any mention of cultural anthropology. If you are writing about how culture deals with “madness,” wouldn’t you be interested in other than European cultures? I’ve already spoken of the post-WW2 years as a “golden age” of cultural anthropology, so there must be something written about how diverse cultures far out of the European tradition deal with such things. I don’t have any information myself, but I expect I will be looking into it at some point if Foucault and Miller don’t get to it here.
Madness and Civilization was published in May of 1961. In 1964 Foucault edited a “radically abridged” version suitable for a mass market paperback. This is the version that was translated into English in 1965. The book was generally well received (though it did not become “popular” in the way Sartre’s Being and Nothingness had. It was, however, savaged by Foucault’s former student, Jacques Derrida. I don’t find Derrida’s criticism very interesting, but he did suggest that Foucault might have written the book, “in the confessed terror of going mad...”
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...Years later , Gilles Deleuze, who probably knew Foucault as well as anyone, said much the same thing, remarking that Foucault used the study of history “as a means of not becoming mad...”
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[From a new appendix to the second edition of Madness and Civilization (1972)] “Some day perhaps man will no longer know what madness was.” Foucault declares. And on that day, “Artaud will belong to the soil of our language and no longer to its breaking point.”
If Artaud’s kind of delirious creativity were to become a key to the enigma of being human, rather than a threat that must be somehow confined, “everything that we today feel shaped by the limit, or by the uncanny, or by the intolerable” -- from the most untamed of impulses to the wildest of fantasies -- might somehow, Foucault speculates, be “transferred to the serenity of positive things.” If that were to happen, what now seems “exterior” -- dreaming, intoxication, the uninhibited pursuit of pleasure -- might “indicate our very selves.”
A hidden fantasy is lurking here. In a different kind of world, one free of the infernal recurrence of transgression and guilt, perhaps the poet on stage that night in 1947 would not have acted like a drowning man. Perhaps he would not have experienced his own most inescapable impulses as cruel, violent, insanely self-destructive. Perhaps he would no longer have suffered for being what he was....
I have to wonder if Foucault, longing for an artistic world without suffering, is any more reasonable than Settembrini was. I think in the past I’ve put the question of the artistic and philosophical advantage -- or necessity -- as Mann does, in terms of illness. But suffering might be the better, more inclusive, term. Whether it is the body, the mind, or the soul that’s not at ease, the end result is still suffering. Is a happy Artaud still the artist Artaud? Does the clam free of irritation still produce a pearl?
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